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So your flat-style intranet has reached the end of its useful life, now what? Are your end-users asking for unreasonable features like personalization, application and system integration, Single-Sign-On and content management? Do they already use industry web portals such as Google's Personalized Home Page, myYahoo or myMSN? Are they wondering why you can't deliver something more like these? Well, you're not alone. The technical skills of today's workforce are light years ahead of where they were 5-10 years ago. The new generation of employees and management are relying on aggregated information sources, served up quickly, through any electronic device. In addition, we've seen social networking sky rocket over the last few years and the use of instant messaging, text messaging, and blogging enter the corporate arena. So back to the original statement, your flat-style intranet has reached the end of its useful life, no what? This is a common question among company's who have a lot of information, in various formats, specific to roles and work units, scattered all over the place, and on various web and file servers.

To continue to leverage the power of a well adopted, but suffering, intranet, a growing trend among companies, both small and large, is the implementation of web portals. A web portal can be defined as many things to many people. In its simplest form a web portal is a website that offers users (employees, customers, partners or end-users) a way to easily find, navigate, and manage information in a consolidated view. Many of the web portal solutions on the market today offer the ability to integrate applications, database content and RSS feeds into their solution.

What does this mean to those looking to satisfy their disgruntled intranet users? It means that with a little planning, design and most times, money, you can resurrect your aligning enterprise intranet or corporate web site into a dynamic, living, breathing, self-service web portal . Users will be thrilled to find that they can manage their content, change the look of their screens, customize their pages and integrate many systems, file folder, applications, into one single view without sifting through disconnected and sometimes unintuitive web pages.

Start reading about things I have learned about leading portal implementations and migrating your corporate intranet to a robust web portal. The beauty of it, you can use any portal solution, such as Microsoft Share Point Server or even an open-source portal like Metadot.

If you are interested in taking your intranet to the next level check out the 11 steps I've identified for a compete web portal deployment and intranet migration, check out rel="nofollow" webportal101webportal101.

Tim Cambier has over 10 years of IT experience and has led the implementation of both open-source and packaged web portal deployements. His experience migrating and managing intranets allows him to relate, and offer advice, on how to get things done. He has published articles on web analytics ( oracletechnology/pub/articles/cambier_discoracletechnology/pub/articles/cambier_disc) and creating your search engine ( devxwebdev/Article/21909devxwebdev/Article/21909) as well as developed and sold his own internet start-up company. He is currently working to establish a website dedicated for web portal deployments and intranet redesigns.